Perhaps the strangest argument being made in Coronado's election season traffic debate is the one that purports to create the concept of "the Coronado bypass."

According to this argument, hordes of frustrated I-5 commuters take the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge, undeterred by tolls, which no longer exist. They are forced onto the Third-Fourth streets couplet, sit in sluggish traffic on Orange Avenue, then travel south on the Silver Strand to Imperial Beach, Chula Vista and points who knows where.

On close examination, however, the argument tends to fall apart.

First, 30 percent of Coronado's housing units are on the Strand at Coronado Cays and Coronado Shores. What else are these drivers – Coronadans – going to do but add to downtown Coronado traffic just to get home?

Second, when pressed for documentation, proponents can only offer "a friend of a friend" anecdotes. They have no license plate surveys, no questionnaires, no comparative commute time data. Nothing.

Coronado has real traffic issues. It also seems to have campaign season hyperbole.

Two traffic measures intended to provide relief are on the ballot even as Mayor Tom Smisek continues to pursue a mile-long tunnel proposal that has risen in cost from an original $122 million to a projected $500 million. That solution, not to mention the five alternatives supposedly being studied simultaneously, is at least 10 years away.

We endorse Proposition L. It would authorize negotiations with Caltrans to allow access from the bridge southbound to Glorietta Boulevard. This would lessen the volume of traffic funneled onto Third and Fourth Streets and shunted down Orange Avenue to the detriment of businesses and shoppers.

We endorse Proposition M, to remove traffic barriers preventing left turns onto A, B and C streets. Clearly, the City Council realized a mistake had been made when it voted for their removal. Were it not for litigation, the barriers would be gone by now.

Mayor Smisek, eligible for a third term despite a two-term limit passed in 2002, received our endorsement despite misgivings over his tunnel proposal.

Incumbent Philip Monroe is an experienced council member and deserves re-election. Challenger Carrie Young, in our view, is precisely what the Coronado City Council needs: diversity. She is young, a member of the work force, the mother of school-aged children, and is not afraid to speak her own mind.